Authors: Carlo Altomonte, Marco Antonielli, Michael Blanga-Gubbay and Silvia Carrieri
The Competitiveness Indicators Report surveys existing indicators in the economic literature, policy papers and databases, in order to provide a critical assessment and set up a selection of the indicators for the data mapping exercise (WP2).
- The report outlines description, rationale and problems of more than 140 indicators, out of which 59 were then selected for their statistical properties, fitness to competitiveness concepts and complementarity among them.
- While recognizing that competitiveness has no shared definition, in the Report we adopt a broad view entailing sustainable growth as underlying concept. For this reason, factors like product quality, innovation and knowledge-based capital – collectively called non-price factors – have been extensively surveyed.
- In addition, we acknowledge that firms – and not countries – employ the productive resources and compete in the domestic and international marketplace. Accordingly, we survey the indicators that can be constructed with micro data, like firm- and product-level data, and systematically compare them with macro-level indicators. When possible, the indicators are defined at the country, sector and regional level, and use respectively micro or aggregated data.
- Our focus is on indicators that describe competitiveness, i.e. tell us if firms, countries, sectors or regions perform well with respect to each other. Drivers of competitiveness, as labour market conditions, infrastructures or institutions, are kept out of our report.
- To improve our assessment and selection of indicators, we identify sixindicators competitiveness concepts, i.e. Productivity, Market Share, Prices and Costs, Innovation & Technology, Firm Dynamics, and Global Value Chains.